Waking up to WisdomIn Stillness and Community

Every week, we post a reading from various wisdom traditions, to provoke insights and deeper reflection. Each thought is also accompanied by an illustration and an audio recordings (and often translations in other languages). Explore and enjoy!

Deep Ecological Awareness Is Spiritual Awareness

The sense in which we use the term "ecological" is associated with a specific philosophical school, founded in the early 1970s by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1912-2009) with the distinction between "shallow" and "deep" ecology. Since then, this distinction has been widely accepted as a very useful term for referring to a major division within contemporary environmental thought.
Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, or human-centered. It views humans as above or outside of nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or "use," value to nature. Deep ecology does not separate humans — nor anything else — from the natural environment. It does sees the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as a...